Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Phanatic posted:

Again, there is a clear exemption in NJ law for transporting your guns between residences. But the judge didn't even allow him to argue that before the jury.

That's because he had been "moving" for months, and left the guns in his car the entire time. That's not kosher.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2013 20:38

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 18:36

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Throatwarbler posted:

I'm sure it varies by year/quarter but I recently read an article about how the majority of Sony's consumer business has been operating at a huge loss for years, and the operational side (i.e. not including insurance/finance/real estate) is basically kept kind-of afloat entirely by Playstation game royalties. So I hope that makes you feel better.

You have to narrow that down to "Sony's consumer electronics business," and it's still a stretch. According to Sony's own records, the video games division lost $80 million last year. They only turned an $18 million profit the year before that, when they weren't dumping cash on a new console launch. Sony Pictures and SME make on the order of a billion dollars every year and even digital cameras is regularly profitable (although it's tied up with their professional broadcast equipment).

# ¿ Jul 2, 2014 00:49

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

two forty posted:

In 1936, the best way to make a rich red-orange glaze relied on one ingredient: raw uranium metal.

Uranium dioxide. :eng101:

# ¿ Jul 25, 2014 08:03

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Sappo569 posted:

$413.69 says dollartimes.com

I still think it'd be neat

That's inflation. That's how much the $30 was worth originally, translated into modern dollars. But the bank account would have to earn around 4% interest annually, on average, to have actually grown that much. That would mean that you more or less broke even after 70 years. It could have grown into thousands, if decently invested, but I have no idea what the average interest rate in the '50s was.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2014 02:31

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

moller posted:

Not... really. CRTs don't "have" a resolution in the same way that we think of resolutions applying to modern displays. They have lines instead of pixels, and support different resolutions by having different refresh rates and dot pitch.

Also, I believe the TV-Out cables (composite/Svideo) had their own limits on lines of output, so the video card was doing downsampling and interlacing on the any image that above 300 or so lines of vertical resolution.

But dot pitch and screen size certainly set a maximum useful resolution for a CRT TV, since it couldn't display a point of color any smaller than one triad. That was rarely going to be much more than 640x480 for the kind of SD television most people owned.

Edit: well, for small-ish TVs. the old 200-lb 40" tubes could probably be pressed to 720p.

Pitch has a new favorite as of 09:40 on Apr 21, 2015

# ¿ Apr 21, 2015 09:35

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Gaz2k21 posted:

My first DVD player was the Samsung 709 it cost about �300 at the time and was easily converted to a multi region machine which is what sold it to me, It would also play VCD but only retail version's home burnt VCD's would get spat out unless they we're burnt onto one specific brand of CD-R.

I think early on it was mostly region-free machines that could play VCD. No one in America even knew what that was, but it was big in Asia. I learned about this the hard way after buying pirated Chinese Cowboy Bebop discs on eBay in like 2001 and realizing they wouldn't work in any player I could find.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2015 13:33

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

WebDog posted:

And print screen?

Code Jockey posted:

Holy poo poo, that's amazing.

What an interesting way to solve the issue of dumping screens to physical copies. I'm imagining some 80's business suit guy waving a gigantic Polaroid in the air, trying to speed up development of the quarterly earnings report

In college I used an electron microscope built in 1984, a Hitachi 570. Full manual controls, analog gauges for all status, and a monochrome green CRT for imaging. On the right side of the control console was a black column used for image capture. A sheet of Polaroid film goes into the top, and a switch on the controls shunts the video signal to another screen in the base of the "camera" assembly. I think this is the same model:

I never actually used it. Ours was hooked up through a serial cable and some black magic analog-to-digital conversion to an iMac. It was glitchy as hell, but way better than the Loch Ness resolution you got from the console screen.

# ¿ Jul 21, 2015 09:52

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

axolotl farmer posted:

Tape backups are still a thing. in the 80s and 90s, there were around for PCs and they were pretty goddamn expensive. They weren't for home use, but small businesses and people who ran a business from their house used the desktop version.

I can see that an inexpensive device that used VHS tapes instead of special, horribly expensive, data tapes could have it's use. 4GB were an insane amount of data in the 1980s. Hard disks were typically 20-40 Megabytes in the late 80s.

I remember seeing ads for a device to record your records to VHS tapes for better audio playback than Compact Cassettes. Now that didn't go anywhere.

The Backer 32, though, was launched in 1998, when you could buy 12 or 18 GB hard drives.

# ¿ Aug 1, 2015 20:40

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Mercury Ballistic posted:

Here is a new topic: imagery satellites. Back when only a few countries had them, they needed to recover the actual film. The satellite would jettison the film canister and it would deorbit and reenter the atmosphere. Prior to landing on the surface, it would be decending via parachute, where it would get grabbed out of the air by a waiting aircraft, then whisked away to wherever for processing.

In one case in 1972, it went wrong and the film fell into the pacific. Check out the link for the full story, but it is quite facinating.
http://m.space.com/17055-classified-hexagon-satellite-capsule-ocean-recovery.html

In 1964, a Corona reconnaissance satellite failed and reentered the atmosphere, landing on a farm in Argentina. The film was ruined, but the highly classified satellite itself was stripped for scrap, gold radiator components, and souvenirs before being recovered by the US. A story about the crash even ended up on the Reuters news wire with photographs, some clearly showing the camera inside.

The remains were shipped back to the US and used to make improvements for future craft to hopefully survive a worst-case reentry. One of the changes made was the removal of the attention-grabbing TOP SECRET markings, which were replaced by a multilingual offer of a reward for returning the capsule to the US government.

http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1063/1

# ¿ Sep 14, 2015 00:49

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

hackbunny posted:

Holy poo poo I looked it up, and the cover is a soldier raping lady justice in front of the burning US constitution

e: OMG "In one part of the novel, he races his hot-rodded GMC truck against a rival Porsche, with Bowman winning, driving in excess of 140 mph to win" this book must be so bad. I'm tempted to read it

e: HAHAHAHAHA of course the only female character is "a victim of childhood abuse and organized crime", "abducted by mafia thugs during a trip to Chicago, Illinois, who force her to become a sex slave for mafia bosses and leaders" even

Buddy, I've got you covered.

# ¿ May 21, 2016 04:33

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

TotalLossBrain posted:

Stock prices seem to agree with you.

It's not even that Kodak though? Maybe I'm the one misunderstanding something, but this product is produced by Spotlite, a company that licenses the Kodak brand for electrical products. Meanwhile everyone is buying stock in Eastman Kodak, a company that still mostly makes printers, and which doesn't even stand to profit from this except maybe in licensing royalties?

Edit: I wouldn't say I'm surprised though because crypto business doesn't have to make any sense to make millions of dollars

Pitch has a new favorite as of 03:03 on Jan 10, 2018

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 03:00

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Apparently the real Eastman Kodak simultaneously announced the KodakCoin ICO.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 03:08

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Geoj posted:

Give it time. Eventually insufferable hipsters will decide compact cassettes have "warm" sound or some such bullshit and the medium will see a resurgence.

Cassette tapes are being pushed as an ironic gift item this season. You can find them in places like Target shelved next to super cheap walkmen (because nobody under 30 already owns a tape deck to play it on and most of the people older than that wouldn't be able to find theirs in their garage). I know when I was shopping I saw some modern but retro stuff like the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack along with a few cheesy old releases like the first Britney Spears album (which came out well into the CD era anyway).

# ¿ Nov 22, 2018 08:55

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 18:36

Pitch: Jun 16, 2005; しらんけど

Platystemon posted:

Don�t use pneumatic tubes to transport radioactive material.

Some research reactors use pneumatic tubes to transport samples to and from the core for neutron bombardment. I'm not sure if that's because it's more rugged than other systems or just because they were all built in the early 60s when nuclear power was the hot new thing.

# ¿ Jul 1, 2019 21:12

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